Electronic Voice Phenomena

From Dead Media Archive

This dossier is currently a work in progress. A more thorough version will be available on Dec. 15, 2010.

Electronic Voice Phenomena, or E.V.P. are noises, produced electronically, than can be interpreted as speech, but are not the result of intentional recording.

E.V.P. soundwaves

A belief in the possibility of communication with spirits from the afterlife can be traced to ancient civilizations the world over. Our fate after death is the central mystery of humanity. If we exist in some form-- spirit, soul, or ghost, after our last breath, then contact with those who have already made this transition could provide a first- hand answer to this question. Throughout history, mystics, mediums and average citizens have claimed to have accomplished such contact. Without evidence of such experience, most claims are dismissed. In the 19th and 20th centuries advancements in technologies of documentation provided the hope of scientific proof of these experiences, and evidence of life after death. Spirit photography provided the first hope for such substantiation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the possibility that the camera could see into dimensions invisible to the naked eye. With the invention of the phonograph and 20th century advancements in recording technologies, the possibility for auditory proof of the spirit world was awakened. Rumors of E.V.P. experimentation date to the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the first E.V.P. was recorded. E.V.P. found its place among paranormal hobbyists in the 1970s, but its popularity is generally attributed to two men, stemming from two separate traditions: psychic Atilla Von Szalay in a turn to auditory technologies where spirit photography had failed, and Dr. Konstantin Raudive, professor, philosopher, parapsychologist and student of Carl Jung in plans to stun the academic, spiritual, and scientific communities with the final empirical evidence of human communication with the dead.

The Spiritualist Movement

Kate and Margaret Fox with sister Leah.

Spiritualism is a monotheistic religion rooted in the concept of continuous life, as evidenced by communication with the Spirit World through mediumship (Brandon 2). Though various beliefs in life after death and the possibility of communication with spirits permeate societies throughout the world, both ancient and modern, Spiritualism is unique in its dual position as both religion and science. The faith traces its 1848 origins to the home of young sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox in Hydesville, New York. Evidently, one day, the girls began to hear inexplicable tapping noises in their room. Before long, they created a modified Morse code by which they would communicate with the apparent source of the knocks: the ghost of a peddler who had been murdered in the Foxes’ home and buried in the cellar (Jung 108). Pamphlets quickly circulated attesting to the girl’s experiences. In the wake of grief over civil war casualties many Americans leaped at the possibility of communication with friends and relatives in the afterlife. Séances became commonplace in both public and private settings and mediumship proliferated (Jolly 9). At its peak in the 1890s the Spiritualist movement was said to have more than eight million members in the United States and Europe (McGarry 2). Believers and converts watched with rapt attention as mediums communicated with the dead through tapping, like the Fox sisters, or fell into trance-like states and spoke in the voices of the dead, proving the existence of life after death. As Carl Jung described the movement, “Because of its dual nature- on the one side a religious sect, on the other a scientific hypothesis- spiritualism touches upon widely differing areas of life that would seem to have nothing in common” (Psychology and the Occult 108). Spiritualism’s place at the intersection of religion and science laid the foundation for a unique and fascinating relationship between religion and technology. Throughout the 20th century, Spiritualists looked to emerging technologies as ancillary tools of the medium, whose aid could not only conjure the images and voices of spirits, but record them as well.

Spirit Photography

William Mumler's spirit photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln and her husband's ghost.

Widespread Spiritualism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries owes its proliferation to the Victorian notion that the camera not only captured reality, but might see more than the naked eye (Green-Lewis 232). The first official spirit photography was developed in 1861 by William S. Mumler in his Boston studio during an experiment with self-portraiture. Mumler reported the appearance of a diaphanous figure, next to his own, resembling a cousin who had died thirteen years earlier (Jolly 14). The photograph soon appeared in numerous Spiritualist publications as the first printed evidence of the existence of spirits. Soon average citizens were doling out large sums for portraits by Mumler, as well as the work of spirit photographers following in his footsteps around the world. Mumler’s most famous portrait presents a seated Mary Todd Lincoln with a ghost translucent image of her deceased husband, his hands on her shoulders (18). Spirit photographers took pictures of individual sitters with the translucent ghosts of deceased loved ones, but also captured spirit materializations during medium trances, psychics conjuring various spirit guides, and the emergence of paranormal material or ectoplasm from the bodies of female mediums. Before public understanding of photographic processes or the possibility of double exposure, Spiritualists, for a time, were given a vast body of seemingly scientific evidence proving the existence and proximity of a spirit world. The height of American and European Spiritualism is inextricably tied to the early years of photography. At a time when photographs were considered scientific proof, spirit photographs showed beings from the afterlife in contact with the living.

Spirit photographs 1910

However, the foundation of this proof was slowly shattered. In 1869 William Mumler was tried for fraud. Though not convicted at the time, he admitted some years later that his body of work was largely the result of a simple process of double exposure (20). As more and more people became amateur or professional photographers and gained knowledge of photographic processes, it became easy to conceptualize how spirit photographs might be the result of certain practices or idiosyncrasies. By the 1920s double exposure became an established artistic practice in the works of Surrealist artists like Man Ray. Spirit photographs, once veritable proof of communication with spirits of the afterlife moved, to a position as kitsch objects of a time when mourners and dabblers in the paranormal were easily duped by the fresh magic of photography. Though the number of practicing Spiritualists dwindled when its chief “scientific” evidence was sullied, true adherents to the Spiritualist movement trudged on, cementing its existence to the present day. Throughout the twentieth century Spiritualist meetings and séances have been the main setting in which mediums proved the existence of continuous life-- mediums serving as conduits for the messages of the dead to the living. The life of spirit photography serves as a case study for the life of Electronic Voice Phenomena, but also likely provided inspiration for those who dreamed of scientific proof of the afterlife and desperately searched for it with new communication and recording technologies.

Atilla Von Szalay

Though the late 1960s work of Dr. Konstantin Raudive is widely credited as having founded the practice of E.V.P. experimentation, the first published work on the phenomena was a collaboration between two men, Atilla Von Szalay and Raymond Bayless, in 1959 (Rogo 84). Von Szalay was a photographer and clairvoyant whose experiments with spirit photography had proved disappointing (Rogo 86). Von Szalay frequently heard disembodied voices in the air around him and his experiments were an attempt to find and document their source. He began audio experimentation with psychologist Raymond Bayless in Los Angeles in the early 1950s (86). At first the pair attempted to record Von Szalay’s voices with a Pack-Bell record cutter, but captured no results. Eventually an enclosed wooden closet was constructed for Attila to sit in and wait for the voices to occur. The men rented an empty studio in Hollywood where they positioned their construction (Ibid 87). Inside of the wooden enclosure, a microphone was placed inside of a speaker trumpet to pick up any voices inside of the closet. A tape recorder and a speaker, wired to the microphone, were positioned outside the walls, so that one could listen for and record any noise or voices emanating from the wardrobe (88).

Raymond Bayless

In this case Von Szalay served the role of medium as it was the voices that had followed him, since long before the experiments, that he and Bayless hoped to record. Von Szalay was not only a participant in the work, but his thoughts were considered a key component of the closet- recording apparatus. His psychic mind was thought to channel any intelligible noises recorded during the experiments. His mediumship powered the machine (86). This second round of work was quite successful for the duo. Noises, whispers, and mechanical sounding voices were observed and recorded whether or not Von Szalay was inside the closet. The voices were interpreted as both male and female and spoke in short sentences, only a few words at a time (87). Eventually, Von Szalay stepped out of the cabinet and recorded the voices at different locations, constructing various cabinet-like devices, some of which were kept in his apartment. At times, the voices emanating from Von Szalay’s mind seemed to possess knowledge of distant thoughts and events. On September 30th, 1971, Bayless was having a private conversation with his wife at home about how he was becoming increasingly misanthropic and shunning social interactions. At the same time, across town, in Van Nuys, Von Szalay was experimenting with a machine that seemed to record the sentence “Bayless is virtually become a recluse” (88). While Von Szalay and Bayless were the first to experiment with E.V.P. extensively, as well as, to record and publish their findings, it is a European scholar who is credited with the birth of E.V.P.

Jung, Psychoanalysis and the Paranormal

Carl Jung was born into a fascination with the paranormal. Samuel Preiswerk, Jung’s maternal grandfather believed himself to be surrounded by ghosts, dedicating one day each week to conversation with his posthumous first wife, whom he kept a chair for in his study. Grandfather Preiswerk’s second wife, Augusta, was considered clairoyant. Jung’s mother, Emilie kept a diary dedicated to “strange experiences”( On Synchronicity and the Paranormal 2). Jung’s own paranormal experiences began at the age of seven or eight, as he described “One night I saw coming from (my mother’s) door a faintly luminous , indefinite figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it, in the air, like a little moon” (2). Jung’s doctoral thesis “ On the psychology and pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena” was a report on a series of séances conducted by his young female cousin. A partial reason for Jung’s initial break with his teacher, Freud, was likely the mentor’s inability to inability to consider spiritualistic phenomena in a “non-pathological light” (5). Jung’s public beliefs about the paranormal vacillated throughout his career, on occasion leaning towards a purely psychological explanation. Yet, Jung always seemed to return to the notion that it would be impossible for such widespread and disparate experience to be dismissed as a phantasm of the mind, as evidenced in a 1948 statement, “After collecting psychological experiences from many people and many countries for over fifty years…To put it bluntly, I doubt whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question” (6).

Carl Jung

Jung continued to observe séances, table turnings and Spiritualist gatherings throughout his career. He was also greatly influenced by the experiments of J.B. Rhine in the first parapsychology institute at Duke University, established in 1932 (15). Rhine and Jung carried out a thirty-year correspondence from 1934 to 1954. Their conversations were of great importance for Jung’s conception of the theory of synchronicity (16). Though Jung is not best known for his more eccentric works on parapsychology and the occult, his intelligence and education make his considerations of the paranormal the most scholarly writings on the topic. Jung carved the way for academics of the 1960s to further explore unusual aspects of the unconscious and search for empirical evidence of paranormal phenomena. Latvian, philosopher, and pre-eminent E.V.P. researcher Konstantin Raudive may have been one of Jung’s most unusual students, but could also be considered the ideal progeny of his lifelong battle, as a rational thinker, with his irrational experiences with the paranormal and his quest through family members, observation and Dr. Rhine to discern the physical veracity of his and all other psychic experiences.

Breakthrough

Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communications with the Dead

The work of Konstantin Raudive, as documented in his 1971 work Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communications with the Dead is part culmination of Raudive’s thoughts as a philosopher and student of Carl Jung, espousing Raudive’s sentiments about the possibility of continuous life. As a scholar, the majority of his career spent at the Univeristy of Uppsala in Sweden, Raudive’s main preoccupation was with the afterlife; Breakthrough seems to be his only major publication. Raudive’s considerations are interesting, but wouldn’t be possible without the results of the experiments, which occupy the vast majority of the book and the accompanying recording. Raudive’s owes his original technique to a layman, his collaborator, Frederich Jurgenson.

Frederich Jurgenson

Frederich Jurgenson was a Swedish renaissance man of the mid-twentieth century. He attended art school and trained as a musician (Rogo 85). As a painter he had been commissioned for two official portraits of Pope Pius XII (Raymond Bayless Foundation). Jurgenson was also a filmmaker and a psychic. One afternoon Jurgenson set out to document bird sounds in the woods. When he took the tape home and listened to it there were numerous voices recorded, which were inexplicable from his experience in the woods (Raudive 3). Jurgenson forgot about the bird-calls and commenced experimentation with E.V.P. and reel to reel tape recorders. He published his work in a 1964 volume titled Voices From Space (3). “He heard not only the voices of near relatives or friends, but also those of historical personages of the recent past, such as Hitler, Goring, Felix Kersten, the Yoga-author Boris Sacharow, the controversial Chessman…” (14). Raudive found Jurgenson’s small book shortly after publication in 1964 and the two began work together in 1965, culminating with the publication of Breakthrough. Raudive, with Jurgenson’s aid, experimented with tape recorders, microphones, and radio, documenting their work in great detail, with Raudive pondering its implications for humanity.

Breakthrough commences with Raudive’s analysis of the meaning of his experiments with Jurgenson. It is clear form this writing that Raudive was thrilled with his findings, which he considers world changing. Raudive believed that the tape, recorder, radio, and microphone, as mechanical devices provided empirical evidence, “…and their objectivity cannot be challenged” (1). Raudive also knew that audio technologies would soon evolve and gain new capabilities, allowing him to project a bright future for E.V.P. “The present stage of the investigation reveals this contact as, so far, only the delicate, fleeting pulse of a new reality, not more than vaguely discernible as yet, because of our lack of experience and inadequacy in our technical aids” (2). Raudive believed the experiments recorded in Breakthrough were just the birth-pangs of whole new set of realizations for mankind, which he could be credited with. “ Only someone who himself ventures to plumb these inaccessible layers of human existence, where we discern neither beginning nor end, only a forward compulsion of our selves and our lives, can assess the true position” (2). Raudive fancied himself a spiritualistic and parapsychological messiah, delivering the great realization of the existence of continuous life on LP recordings.

"My research has led me to the personal conclusion that apart from the biological-physical level on which we human beings here exist, there is a second level: that of the psychical-spiritual level, whose potentialities are only released after death. This psychical-spiritual being tried to build a bridge between its world and that of our earthly form of life, and it endeavors on its own initiative to make contact in order to guide those on earth into a new reality "(2).

Konstantin Raudive

In Raudive’s mind, the E.V.P. recordings he had made, were just the beginnings of the scientific work that would change the way human beings thought about life.

"It is quite possible that one day results will emerge from the voice experiments that will have a bearing on the highest, indeed the ultimate goal man has sought throughout the ages and is still seeking- the answer to the question: who am I and where am I going? Death might then be seen as no more than a metamorphosis from one state of development to another" (2).

As Raudive saw it, his body of work was the scientific answer to the age-old questions of every religious or spiritual sect. He recognized that paranormal claims were not novel, but consistently re-iterates the “empirical nature” of his E.V.P. evidence, quickly dismissing the possibility of a psychological explanation. Raudive contends that E.V.P. phenomena cannot be dismissed as a product of the unconscious, as the unconscious may very well simply be a panacea that explains this very type of phenomena, inexplicable to the rational human mind. Raudive quotes his professor, Jung. “…psychology can know nothing about the substance of the psyche, because it cannot realize anything except through the psyche. One can therefore neither deny nor confirm the validity of such terms as Mana, Daemon, or God; but one can note that the feeling of unfamiliarity, which is connected with the experience of the objective, is authentic” (8). According to Raudive, the experiments detailed in Breakthrough, constituted unequivocal evidence of spirits of the afterlife, who sought communication with the living.

The first meaningful recording that Raudive took through microphone ostensibly said, in Latvian, Raudive’s native language “ That is right” (17). Raudive details five methods for obtaining and recording E.V.P.

1. Microphone Recording

"Speed can be adjusted to 3 ¾ i.p.s. or 7 ½ i.p.s. Jurgenson considers a speed of 7 ½ i.p.s. more suitable to the fast talking voices, but Raudive’s personal experiments produced even clearer voices at 3 ¾ i.p.s. Sessions can consist of a number of people in a room or a single individual. After the microphone is set up to record and the tape starts sessions should not last more than ten or fifteen minutes. People can conjure the names of dead relatives and ask questions of the spirits. Gossiping is to be avoided. Microphone voices tend to be soft, so participants are advised to speak slowly, loudly and clearly. Microphone voices fall into three grades of audibility:
a) Can be heard and identified by those with normal human hearing and knowledge of the language spoken (several hundred of Raudive’s E.V.P. recordings fall into this group)
b) Consists of voices that speak more rapidly and more softly but are still quite plainly audible to a trained and attentive ear.
c) Consists of the most interesting voices; voices that give us a great deal of information and much paranormal data. Unfortunately, these can be heard only in fragments, even by a trained ear, but with improved technical aids, it may eventually become possible to hear and demonstrate these voices, which lie beyond our range of hearing, without trouble" (21).

1960s transistor radio

2. Radio Recordings

In Voices from Space Jurgenson maintains that no radio recordings could be made without a “mediator” ( 22). A mediator is usually the disembodied voice of a woman(23). At the end of 1965 Raudive identified once such mediator, by the Latvian name Spidola.

"If one is relying on the help of the ‘mediator,’ one glides slowly from one end of the wavelength-scale to the other and listens carefully for a voice that will his ‘Now’ or ‘Make Recording’ or some such hint. At that precise moment one turns on the tape recorder. Radio voices too can be grouped into three grades of audibility; but they differ from microphone-voices in that their pronunciation is clearer and their messages are longer and have more meaning. We know that radio waves penetrate the human body without being registered by the sense organs. Electro-magnetic fields within us continually make music or speeches and perhaps these voices from ‘beyond’ also cry out for contact within us and we fail to hear them" (23).

3. Radio- Microphone Recordings
Raudive discovered a method of combined Radio and Microphone recording by chance one day while playing back a previous recording. Apparently a voice on the tape demanded “signals” (24).

"Suppressing my astonishment I followed this strange recording to the end. When the tape had run through I fixed a fresh one, as I intended to make a radio-voice recording, but I forgot to adjust the tape recorder so that in effect the recording was made through microphone while the radio connection remained in operation. On playing the tape back I discovered several voices; by mistake, so to speak, I had stumbled upon a method which opened up quite new possibilities of registering conversation. By this method the voices can enter into discussions and answer questions "(24).

This method of recording was quite similar to that of radio recording, but the tape recorder stayed switched to microphone, with the microphone placed very close to the radio. It was optimal to turn the radio to a wavelength with no transmission only the “rushing sound” (24). Broadcast voices would sometimes interfere with Raudive’s work, but could be separated from the E.V.P. voices as they did not posses they characteristic language, speed and timber of the E.V.P. voices.

4. Frequency Transmitter Recording

"This method excludes freak noises from radio and microphone: only carrier frequencies operate and these are used by the voice-entities. The voices thus recorded show the same traits as those of other recording materials. Their statements are often slightly overlaid by sinus-frequencies, but their audibility is good and they are free from other interferences. Up to several hundred voices recorded in this fashion have been definitely verified…"(25).

Diode closeup

5. Diode Recording

"In this highly interesting method the recording is made directly from the room on to the tap. For various reasons it is a complicated process. The length of the aerial (6-8cm) had to be precisely adjusted, and vibrations sent out by the voices are received by this aerial. In quality the voices thus received come closest to those of ordinary human ones, although we find exactly the same peculiarities as before. When this last method has been further developed and perfected, we shall be able to regard it as a direct contact, in every sense of the word, with the unseen entities. Results of the diode-recordings can be heard without great difficulty even by the untrained and unprepared ear. One had the impression that the voices speak directly on to the tape; they have spaceless quality, an immediate impact and their diction is remarkably clear; they are instantly received and can be heard without atmospheric interferences "(25).

In the Raudivian methodology, once E.V.P. was recorded, it had to be interpreted. As previously described, these voices possessed characteristics and language, unlike that of any earthly speech. “ They speak in an unmistakable rhythm and usually employ several languages in a single sentence; the sentence construction obeys rules that differ radically from those of ordinary speech and, although, the voices seem to speak in the same way as we do, the anatomy of their ‘speech apparatus’ must be different from our own” (27). The ear had to attune itself to listen for E.V.P. voices. Individuals with musical training were apparently more adept at picking up voices quickly (8). Though numerous languages often appeared in one sentence, the words were pronounced in a uniform manner. Sentences were terse in a fast, rhythmic “telegram style” mode. Raudive postulated on the unique anatomy of the spirit speech apparatus and the restriction it might have imposed “…grammatical rules are frequently abandoned and neologisms abound” (29). Raudive concluded that spirits were different, evolved in some way from their terrestrial bodies speaking to us in the universal language of the afterlife. An LP recording of the E.V.P. experiments, along with narration by Raudive and voice interpretation by his assistants was released alongside the book’s publication. The experiments are some of the same which appear in the book’s transcripts and present all technological methods of E.V.P. used to communicate with dead friends, relatives, strangers, and historical figures.

Diode Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communications with the Dead LP

Raudive likely owes the publication of Breakthrough to its final section. In the book’s introduction publisher Peter Bender describes his initial skepticism towards the book and Raudive, as just another eccentric among the “ host who are set on telling us that life after death is a reality which can be scientifically proven” (vii). Bender would have dismissed the book were it not for the final section of testimonial letters by scientists and religious figures whom he knew “to be of the highest integrity and incapable of supporting anything scientifically suspect…”(xv) In fact, over four hundred people participated in Raudive’s E.V.P. experiments, many highly educated and well respected. Many wrote letters attesting to the important of Raudive’s work, but also as simple testimony of their participation in the experiments. These testifiers included: Rev. Prof. Dr. Gebhard Frei of the Mission Society of Bethlehem, a Roman Catholic Priest and President of the International Society of Catholic Parapsychologists, Dr. Zenta Maurina, Writer and Doctor of Philosophy, leading authority on the works of Dostoevsky, and Dr. Hans Naegli, psychiatrist and President of the Society for the parapsychology, Switzerland.

In spite of the letters of recommendation and some of the most meticulous paranormal research of the 20th century, Raudive’s experiments failed to gain the attention he predicted. Raudive died a few years after the publication of Breakthrough in 1974. Frederich Jurgenson continued to experiment with E.V.P. until his death in 1987 and helped to facilitate new paranormal, E.V.P. related research through television. Whether deserving of the credit, Konstantin Raudive is hailed as the father of E.V.P. experimentation and the “scientific” experiments detailed in Breakthrough were considered the golden standard in E.V.P.

Magical Thinking

Predating the Spiritualist movement is the practice of magical thinking. In their book, “Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking” (1989), Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones define magical thinking as, “the belief that (a) transfer of energy or information between physical systems may take place solely because of their similarity or contiguity in time and space, or (b) that one's thoughts, words, or actions can achieve specific physical effects in a manner not governed by the principles of ordinary transmission of energy of information” (13).

Magical thinking has been around since the prehistoric era but Zusne and Jones cite an experiment carried out by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 as one of the first instances of magical thinking in relation to anomalistic events. During this time, animal magnetism was thought of as a popular cure for illnesses. While Franklin was in France, the American Ambassador commissioned him to carry out and experiment in an effort to determine the validity of this treatment. The results of this experiment revealed that the change in the patients' health as a result of such contact with magnetism was largely psychosomatic - “imagination was responsible for the magnetic cures” (9). For part of the experiment, Franklin instructed patients to stand under a group of trees. He told some of them (untruthfully) that the trees had been “magnetized” (ibid) and told the others nothing. The improvements in the health of these patients turned out to be similar to those who are treated with animal magnetism. This is an interesting and very early instance of the science and the paranormal being used in tandem, a connection we have seen evolved at the foundation of the spiritualist movement to come.

Zusne and Jones make the argument “that magical thinking is wholly or partly at the root of any explanation of behavioral and experiential phenomena that violates some law of nature or suggests, without supporting evidence, that existence of principles, forces, or entities unknown to science” (13). In this line of thought, magical thinking seems to be a prerequisite for spiritualism. They write, “Magical thinking arises in connection with uncertainty concerning cause-effect relationships” (14). Resulting from our belief that “a 'why?' question requires a 'because' answer” (ibid).

Our human reliance on a linear relationship between cause and effect is the first of four “limiting principles” developed in 1953 by C. D. Broad (born Charlie Dunbar Broad) to describe the basic mechanisms of nature as we understand it. (Zusne and Jones 1) The second principle is a collapsing between the mind and the brain – the thought that mental events cannot happen without a corresponding corporal incident in one's brain. The third is an understanding that matter, such as inanimate objects “cannot be moved simply by willing them to move or be transformed into other objects in the same way” (Zusne and Jones 2). The fourth and final principle is the limitation on one's ability to learn things – that one cannot know something without direct experience. Magical thinking takes place when there is some rupture in these rules that cannot be explained with science.

This practice is often thought to be prevalent in the psyches of children or pre-enlightened societies where scientific thought is either disregarded or not privileged. However, Zusne and Jones note that anyone, even adults in post-industrial societies can get wrapped up in magical thought, intentionally or not. (14) Bronislav Malinowski, a Polish Anthropologist, wrote about the allure of magic and magical thinking, particularly as a source or comfort in the face an experience with the phenomena of the unknown. According toe Zusne and Jones, Malinowski's research, which focused on the use of magic in a community of Melanesian islanders, showed that “magic is resorted to only when there is uncertainty (Malinowski, 1954)” (15). Zusne and Jones give the following as instances which disrupt our understanding of natural causation, resulting in an escape to magical thought:

1. The energy transfer feature is not obvious, or under conditions that make its observation difficult or impossible;
2. The phenomenon is rare of appears to be rare and therefor to lie outside the range of the more common phenomena known to be governed by natural laws;
3. The circumstances surrounding the phenomenon involve chance to such an extent that the phenomenon itself appears to be due to chance and hence subject to magical influences;
4. Little or no control can be exercised over events, and the predictability of such events is slight;
5. Psychopathological states distort the thinking process to a degree where fantasy and therefor magical thinking replace causal thinking” (15)

Pareidolia

Example of Rorschach Inkblot

Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon of imbuing an unexplained and random stimuli with significance. For example, seeing a face in the pattern a tree's bark or attributing unclear sounds in a recording to a message from the dead, such as is the focus of this paper. E. V. P. falls under the category of auditory pareidolia. It is usually extremely challenging for one to change their perception of a stimuli once it has been determined. “If two cloud puffs are seen as the cheeks of Santa Claus, it becomes more difficult to see them as two humps of a camel, and vice versa” (Zusne and Jones 77). This perceptual persistence can lay the groundwork for obsession, especially in cases where pareidolia is given religious or supernatural significance (ibid).

The Rorschach inkblot test exploits the kind of thinking that creates pareidolia, working on the premise that “verbalized pareidolia will reveal the subject's unconscious life and wishes as these are projected upon the diffuse, ambiguous blots” (Zusne and Jones 77). This kind of projection on stimuli is a common trope in the accounts from those who experienced E. V. P. Konstantin Raudive wrote that the E. V. P. messages he received were in languages he was very familiar with and that they often contained the voices of people he knew who had died. “In other words, the tapes were private, individualized, auditory Rorschach cards” (Zusne and Jones 78).

Detecting Techno-Spiritual Unity

A reel-to-reel recorder.

Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Leshan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.

In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.

Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See Spirit Photography for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.

The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.

The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Leshan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others.

The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.

A cassette tape recorder.

EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Leshan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.

Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.

Replacing Human Media: Mechanically Mediating Spiritual Communication

Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine.

EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.

Liminal Consciousnesses

Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.

In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself.

Backward Masking

'I don't know what Beatles records sounds like backwards. I never play them backwards.' - John Lennon, in a 1969 WKNR interview (Reeve 73).

Unlike the inherent randomness of E. V. P., Backward masking the method used to record reverse messages (usually hidden) intentionally or with alleged intentionality. Backward masking became extremely popular with musical artists and the source of pure evil for their more conservative critics during the 80s an early 90s. In an act of auditory pareidolia, these reverse messages were thought to be either satanic in content or sent from Satan himself. These claims were also made about songs which, in fact, contained no reserved messages. Critics believed that playing the recordings backwards was not necessary to receive the evil and satanic massages, but that they would be subliminally consumed by the oblivious listener (Zusne and Jones 78).

In “Turn Me One, Dead Man: The Beatles and The 'Paul-Is-Dead' Hoax” (2004), Andru J. Reeve makes the distinction of two separate processes used to achieve this effect. The first process, Engineered reversal, is when the taped recording of a message in forward motion is literally and physically turned around and played. The other process is called Phonetic reversal. Using the example of The Beatles' song “Revolution 9”, Reeve writes that phonetic reversal is recording of someone actually speaking backwards. This is easiest in instances like the one present in “Revolution 9” where the English phrase “turn me on, dead man” because the more innocuous “number nine” when sung in reverse. (74)

In 1982, legislation was introduced as a result of a bill initiated by Orange Country, California's former Republican representative. The short-lived bill used Led Zeppelin's “Stairway To Heaven” as its main exampled. The bill accused the song of containing a backward message saying, “I live for Satan, the one whose little path would make me glad” (Reeve 233). While this bill was in effect, the accused records were required to contain the following disclaimer in their packaging:

“WARNING: This record contains backward masking that makes a verbal statement which is audible when this record is played backward and which may be perceptible at a subliminal level when this record is played forward” (Reeve 232).

Commodifying the Uncanny: Hell Awaits

Hell Awaits. Slayer, 1985. Simi Valley, CA: Metal Blade Records

The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.

Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.

Cause and Effect

Poster for "White Noise'" (2005)

Poster for 2007's "Paranormal Activity"

Though the popularity of E.V.P. as a practice has declined tremendously over the past few decades, our interest in the paranormal and unknown remains – our reliance on cause and effect just as strong. The 2005 film "White Noise'" (Geoffrey Sax), starring Michael Keaton is about a widowed man using E. V. P. in an effort to contact his wife in the afterlife despite warnings from a paranormal expert that such practices could attract unsavory spirits. With the dawn of reality television, there has been an insurgence of shows dedicated to the investigation of the paranormal or supernatural. With the dawn of reality television, there has been an insurgence of televisions shows dedication to the investigation of the paranormal and the supernatural. This seems to have influenced an aesthetic shift in the film world away from purely fictional, fourth-wall heavy movies, to one with a more documentary, found-footage style.

What do these trends mean for our relationship with the paranormal other than that this lack of knowledge has become worthy of exploit? Do these movies and television shows end up creating a reinforce separation between you and rupture in your understand of the natural world? Or are they actually sources of comfort and, in a sense, commodified mediums or even instructional guides for magical thinking?

Works Cited

Brandon, Ruth. The Spiritualists New York: Knopf, 1983

Green-Lewis, Jennifer Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Jolly, Martyn Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. London. The British Library, 2006.

Jung, C.G. Psychology and the Occult. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press, 1977

Jung, C.G. On Synchronicity and the Paranormal. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press, 1997